Sandy Green, The Gap-Filler
Image by Kellianne Jordan
[A food I can't live without is] scallops sautéed in fresh butter with parmesan. That’s heaven to me.
Her first job in the early ’70s in Laconia, N.H., was as a waitress at Hart’s Turkey Farm in nearby Meredith. She was about 14 at the time, and recalls having to lie about her age to get it, says Sandy Green ’86.
Over time, Green moved up the food chain to better jobs in fancier restaurants. By the time she was in college at Salem State, she was serving Bananas Foster and specialty coffees at the Andover Inn.
Green took a long break from the restaurant business, spending more than 25 years in IT—a natural progression from the M.S. she earned in electrical engineering at UML—before selling the IT services firm she founded, n-Link Corp., to its employees in 2009. By then, she had moved with her husband from Washington state to Bend, Ore.—where, during house-hunting, she says today, “We could never find a place where we both liked to eat.”
Most of the dining options in Bend at the time, she recalls, “were either granola, redneck or hoity-toity. There wasn’t much in between. It was a real gap in the market.”
In 2010 she filled that gap with The Phoenix restaurant. Designed from the start as a “restaurant for everyone,” it targets its menu and its layout across the demographic spectrum.
“Top service, and quality ingredients. And something for every taste.”—GD